An Anthropologist’s Take on Homemaking

Mary Catherine Bateson, at her home in Hancock, N.H., is exploring the impact of longevity on family life.Credit
Trent Bell for The New York Times

HANCOCK, N.H.

WHEN Mary Catherine Bateson was a freshman at Radcliffe, she and the man she was dating went to hear her mother, Margaret Mead, lecture on the future of the American family. Afterward, back in her beau’s room, Dr. Bateson averred that the future of the American family would surely not include her, because with role models like her parents — Dr. Bateson likes to say that her mother was thrice divorced while her father, the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, was thrice married — she would never, ever marry.

“How could I possibly know how?” she said.

Yet by the end of that conversation, Dr. Bateson, who went on to have careers as an anthropologist, linguist and author, and J. Barkev Kassarjian, now a professor of management and a business consultant, found themselves engaged.

Fifty years later, Dr. Bateson and Dr. Kassarjian are still married — turns out, Dr. Bateson is very good at domesticity — and still living in the same New Hampshire woods, on the property they bought together as graduate students in 1963. (They also have an apartment in Cambridge, Mass.) The “spread” — an 18th-century farmhouse, a decent barn and a shed on 100 acres — cost $15,000, a fortune for two young academics who took out a bank loan guaranteed by Dr. Mead to buy it, Dr. Bateson said.

“Golly, it’s a lot of years ago,” she added, shaking her head.

Dr. Bateson, once known as Dr. Spock’s first baby and a product of “the best-documented childhood in the United States,” as she wrote in a memoir about her parents, is now 70. Yet, as her mother did, she is still hashing out the particulars of what she calls “homemaking” with a new book, “Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom,” out next month from Knopf.

It was lunchtime on a recent misty weekday. Dr. Bateson and a reporter had shimmied themselves into the legless “chairs” in Dr. Bateson’s kursi room, a glassy space furnished to mimic the seating arrangements in Persian households. (Dr. Bateson and Dr. Kassarjian lived in Iran before the revolution and adopted a few of its customs.) The room is in a corner of the airy, barn-like house Dr. Bateson and her husband built four years ago on the footprint of the old barn. “It wasn’t a very beautiful barn,” she said. “We’d always wanted to bulldoze. It just took us 46 years.”

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Mary Catherine Bateson in her living room. The family lived in Iran before the revolution, and the house includes Persian elements.Credit
Trent Bell for The New York Times

In Dr. Bateson’s parlance, homemaking is not so much about decoration and renovation. Rather, it’s a metaphor for community, for the design of an environment — professional or domestic or societal — that challenges and supports its inhabitants, an ideal closer to the arrangement of a Samoan village than a perfectly appointed living room. “It’s critical that home not just be a place that you use whatever is there, but that it be a place you are truly responsible for,” she said. “It’s not just your home and you get to mess it up.”

Homemaking, she added, is also a metaphor for longevity, a way of looking at the second stage of adulthood that precedes old age — what she calls “adulthood II” — which is the subject of her new book.

Yes, it’s a sequel to her 1990 meditation on the stop-and-start nature of women’s lives, except that this time she has invited men into the conversation.

A bit of background: The first “Composing a Life” was not tidy pop psychology, like that offered in the “Passages” franchise created by Gail Sheehy. Nor was it a hard-hitting myth-exploder like Susan Faludi’s “Backlash.” But with its themes of loss, ambivalence and frustration, its vivid portraits of five bright, successful women at midlife (including Dr. Bateson, once a dean at Amherst College, who wrote about being ousted from her job there), it touched a nerve. The book proposed that women’s adaptive responses to setbacks and sadness were of enormous value — that the improvisational nature of some lives is worth emulating and celebrating.

Its reviews were glowing. Younger writers like Peggy Orenstein, author of “Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World,” were inspired by it. Hillary Rodham Clinton hailed the book as a touchstone.

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The dining table.Credit
Trent Bell for The New York Times

Also, it was beautifully written. Amid the maelstrom of what came to be known as third-wave feminism — characterized by the heated academic prose of writers like Naomi Wolf, for example — “Composing a Life” arrived like a cool drink of water.

Dr. Bateson’s new book is not as seismic as its precursor because its theme — that human longevity has given rise to a second stage of “active” adulthood, the enormously productive period between the ages of 50 and 75 — is so familiar.

That’s O.K.: Reading a book by Dr. Bateson (this is her 12th) is like being invited to dinner with your smarter friends. You get to be your best self, virtually mingling, as it were, with someone like Richard Goldsby, a biology professor, who really gives it up to Dr. Bateson, revealing how he bullied his first wife and the mother of his children, pushing her down in service to his own, brilliant career. His is a view from the other side; much of Dr. Bateson’s writings have dug deep into the ways women’s careers take second place to their husbands’.

The big questions are explored: What makes work satisfying and worthwhile? What does it mean to be married? How do you find a spiritual practice?

Dr. Bateson’s mother, for example, believed that practice preceded theology, a spiritual version of the old adage “fake it till you make it.”

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Dr. Bateson’s son-in-law contributes farm gear; her grandsons add whimsy.Credit
Photographs by Trent Bell for The New York Times

Dr. Bateson, a long-lapsed Catholic, writes of entering a hospital in 2006 for surgery to have a cyst removed from her brain, and hoping that check-in would include a question about religious preferences, forcing her to make a choice. Instead, she found herself “on a conveyor belt to the O.R.,” stammering “words of faith and contrition as best I knew how.”

Along with Dr. Goldsby’s life story, Dr. Bateson has collected that of the former dean of St. John the Divine, who founded a multifaith center; a gay teacher whose professional life never quite gelled; and Jane Fonda, who at the time of the writing of this book was working on her own book on the same topic.

Dr. Bateson paints a cozy scene of the two women taping each other in Dr. Bateson’s house here. A friend worries that Dr. Bateson will give the movie star her best anecdotes, enriching Ms. Fonda’s book at the expense of her own, but Dr. Bateson disagrees. Ideas aren’t property, she writes, but “bread to be cast on the waters.”

The other day, Dr. Bateson was tearing pita bread into quarters for the Mediterranean feast she had prepared and laid out in her kursi room. The bread was to accompany an Iranian staple, a plate of feta cheese, mint and tarragon.

“The Iranians cut their bread up with scissors in neat little triangles, but I like the feel of shredding it,” she said.

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Credit
Trent Bell for The New York Times

There was a Greek salad and an array of hummus, tabbouleh and dolmades (a k a stuffed grape leaves), all served on a tapestry-draped takht, which Dr. Bateson said translates literally as “platform,” but can also refer to a low table used for meals. Dr. Bateson found hers backstage at a performance of the Peterborough Players, a local theater group. It was part of a set that had last been used in a production of “Inherit the Wind.”

“In Persian houses,” she said, “there’s a brazier in the middle of the takht. We have an electric heater. You can even use a light bulb.”

The idea, she said, is that on cold days you tuck your feet underneath and toast them on the heater.

There were stuffed animals on a few chairs, remnants of her two grandsons’ last visit. On the sideboard, a photograph of Dr. Bateson at age 5 with her parents shared space with another of a beloved dog.

Dr. Kassarjian, she said, was in Switzerland (he teaches in Lausanne and at Babson College). “At least, I think he’s in Switzerland,” she added. “He might be getting on the plane.”

“We give each other a lot of space,” she said, describing their marriage as a strong friendship and a collaboration. “We travel so much for our work, we don’t like to travel together. We hang out a lot here. I think we do best when we’re working on a project together. Barkev has read all my books in manuscript. We had a lot of fun designing this house, though it took nearly 50 years to do so.”

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The main house is at center; a tenant lives at left and the guest house is at right.Credit
Trent Bell for The New York Times

When she and her husband built the house on the site of the old barn in 2007, they reversed a typical move in “adulthood II,” upsizing rather than downsizing. They knocked down the shed on the property and replaced it with a guest house, which they have handed over to their daughter, Sevanne Martin, an actress, who is married and has two young sons. (Sevanne is the name of a lake in Armenia; Dr. Kassarjian is Armenian. “It’s like naming your daughter Loch Lomond,” Dr. Bateson joked. Martin is a stage name.)

The farmhouse has long been rented to a tenant who acts as caretaker when Dr. Bateson and Dr. Kassarjian are away. “Both of us think of New Hampshire as home in a way in which Cambridge is not,” she said, showing off the trails through the woods, the rough-cut stone statues put there by a tenant who rented the place when the family was in the Philippines (“We call them ‘the lurkers,’ ” Dr. Bateson said) and the rusty farm equipment her son-in-law is fond of bringing home.

“My husband is not convinced these are decorative objects,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

There are wild blueberries on the path to Norway Pond, where Dr. Bateson takes her afternoon swim.

“Home is a very important metaphor for me,” she said. “When I was working on ‘Composing a Life,’ I referred to it as ‘my homemaking book.’ How do you make a home when there is discontinuity? You are a single mother, there is a bad marriage, a job change. I started to define the word ‘home’ as an environment in which one grows and learns, rather than just a refuge. Think about where you started out as a little kid and you learned to walk. Sometimes there were things you tripped over. There were people who loved you but also made demands on you.”

Dr. Bateson’s first home life was communal. After her birth in 1939, her parents offered themselves up to the war effort (Dr. Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services; Dr. Mead worked in Washington). Dr. Mead moved her daughter into a brownstone on Perry Street (“I believe there is a plaque,” Dr. Bateson said), combining households with the family of the economist and social scientist Lawrence K. Frank, who had seven children.

“We had the bottom two floors and they had the top and there was a backyard, and it was just terrific,” Dr. Bateson said. “I got free siblings! My mother created a village, and it was wonderful. We didn’t have sofas, we had beds with backs on them so my mother could always offer someone who needed it a place to sleep. So people came and went. It always seemed to me the best arrangement is the joint household instead of a separate house, a separate car, a separate lawnmower that’s not always being used.”

Homemaking, she stressed, needs to be less selfish.

“We are living longer, but thinking shorter.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2010, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Homemaking as a Metaphor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe